Inukshuk

Author:Gregory Spatz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2012-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

HE WAS EXHAUSTED, but not in the ordinary way—more like someone had taken out his central power source. Downed all major power lines, leaving only trickles of energy where random portions of the grid remained intact or an emergency generator had kicked to life. Residual strength here and there in places it had lain untapped. What an excruciating process to bend and raise legs, lift feet, repeat, repeat, repeat, press on against the wind, bits of blown ice and snow burning his cheeks like glass. Exhaustion in the corners of his eyes making the lids scratch, as if he’d rubbed them with dirty fingers. Poked them. So tired, he thought. Why so tired? And his hand—not that it hurt really, but he couldn’t put it out of mind, either—numb and prickling with weird edges of feelings that didn’t belong in a hand. Once, years ago, he’d been afflicted with something like this, accompanying a high fever: hallucinations that had caused his senses to invert, especially hearing and touch, so certain sounds became unearthly harsh and magnified, while others faded in a wash of static, and his fingertips, numb on the outside, had felt bloated with the prickly weight of his circulation and the narrow pressure of bones inside skin.

They’d been harassing him all day, running up from behind and blurting cryptic hockey slang—face wash; deke the pylon; butt-ended ya, ha-ha; catch you in the rink, mo-fo—alternately poking him, waving things in his face, knocking books from his hands. Nothing as forceful as the first attack following math class, so either they’d decided, en masse, to lighten up, be more polite, or he’d gotten better at anticipating them, bracing himself and continually checking over a shoulder to see what was coming. Consequently, her light taps to his head and shoulder as she ran by, jumped a snowbank, and swung around in his path, facing him, didn’t startle him half as much as her presence there in front of him, so incongruous and with that incongruous blue-purple stain creeping out to her cheek and vanishing into the fringe of her hood. Almost before he could stop himself, he was winding up to swing at her.

“Thomas!”

“Oh. Hey. It’s you.”

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You looked like . . . Never mind, weirdo.” She turned and they started walking. “Fun at school today? Any more fights?”

He attempted a sputtering noise of dismissive contempt and scorn, but the breath caught in his throat more like a sob, surprising him and requiring more. “Not exactly. Today was the day of random hip checks and other surprise moronic hockey moves. Someone’s going to have to pay.”

“Scuse me?”

“There’s this scene I’m thinking of, like probably one of the first real cannibalism scenes, maybe close to the end of act one—somewhere around there anyway—hacking up one of the frozen corpses for stew.” He slid his eyes at her and noted how she walked like a kid still—shoulders hunched and swinging, hands deep in her coat pockets. Or maybe it was the way she flung her feet out.

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